Does meta "Expires" tag affect website cacheing or indexing?

[JamesDixon70]

One of our client has a meta expire tag across all pages of their website.

Does that tag affect the website overall caching or indexing?

Their website pages including home page is crawled every 10 days, however the website is popular high traffic websites, receiving 240,000 visits/month.

Please advise what impact this tag will have on the website indexing and caching?

Thanks

Atomic Team

[Modi]

To the best of my knowledge, Ideally Meta Expires is used for an Event. Suppose there is a music show or event - it may be wise to use Meta Expires as it indicates to Google to delete the page from index when the expiry time meets.

[JamesDixon70]

Thanks Gagan for the reply. However, you reply is more towards where to use, whereas my query is one of our clients has already used this tag on their website. So, would it affect their website's indexing or caching? Thanks.

[Modi]

Hi James,

The tag mentioned in itself is wrong and hence is not taken into consideration by search engines.

The correct tag should have been

Correct Format is :- Weekday followed with Date (Day Month Year) followed with Time Format as GMT/EST . This is basically the standard RFC format

Refer - http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2068/rfc2068 for more details on RFC Format.

The tag if put correctly states an indication for search engine to delete expired documents from a search engine, unless been followed with a revisit tag

So, had the correct tag would have been put in place - all the pages would have been deleted from Google Index - as the tag states that the document is expired. It's a kind of 'nofollow' indication to Google. However, most of the Search marketers do not use meta expire tag, rather

• they 301 it, if the page has become redundant

or follow it it with revisit tag to let search engines to start crawling it from specified date onwards.

[KristinaKledzik]

It's most likely that Google is ignoring this, and will continue to ignore it.

There are just too many meta tags that you can include, and Google knows they're often used manipulatively. Unless you were using the meta expiry tag a lot and completely correctly, search engines will probably ignore it. (By correctly, I mean, use it for pages that actually do expire, then cutting off internal links after this date.)

That said, it's probably best to remove this tag.